


The Hardest Thing in This World (Is To Live In It)

by igrockspock



Category: Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Genre: Gen, Mentorship, Post Season 6, tough love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-27
Updated: 2015-09-27
Packaged: 2018-04-23 16:16:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,149
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4883437
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/igrockspock/pseuds/igrockspock
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Willow, Giles, a cabin in the woods, and the aftermath of the day she tried to destroy the world</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Hardest Thing in This World (Is To Live In It)

Willow is not on suicide watch.

She thought she would be; it seemed like a responsible, Gilesy thing to do. 

Giles had certainly taken other responsible, Gilesy precautions. The innocuous-looking picket fence outside her cabin is actually a magical barricade -- not that she’d tested it. She didn’t want to go anywhere. She just knew. 

Giles comes to visit her at 10 o’clock every morning. Not too early, not too late. Always with some kind of terrible British snack food, like bland little cookies that he insists on calling biscuits, even though he knows it gets her hopes up for fluffy bites of doughy goodness.

This is his third visit. They’ve never exchanged more than pleasantries: _I trust you are well_ and _do tell me if you need anything_. She fights the urge to swing her feet in the chair; she’s too old to fidget, and she’d always wanted Giles to think of her as a grown-up.

“So…” she says to break the silence. Then she realizes she doesn’t know what to say. She looks around the little cabin. “Do we just, um, sit here? Is there some kind of mental health evaluation? Do you need to take the sharp things away?”

Giles raises his eyebrows and regards her over his cup of tea.

“Are you planning to kill yourself?” he asks mildly.

He sounds like he already knows the answer. Willow does too.

***

The alarm clock rings at eight o’clock every morning. It’s the old-fashioned kind, with little brass bells on top, and Willow likes the weight of it in her hands. When she rolls over and looks out the window, the sky is invariably dull and gray, but she likes seeing it anyway. She runs her fingers over the sheets and presses her feet flat on the cold wooden floor. 

If she wanted to call Buffy, or write her a letter, there would be nothing to say. Everything she does is ordinary. Everything she touches is normal. But she runs her hands over everything anyway. It means she’s alive. This world is real, and she is a part of it in a way she hasn’t been for a very long time.

So sue her. She killed people. She meddled with their minds. She raised them from the dead. Maybe she should want to die. But the fact is, she likes being alive.

***

Since she’s alone most of the day, it’s hard not to think. Mostly, she thinks about what other people think about her. Would Buffy ever want to see her again? Would Dawn? 

It takes her the better part of a week to work up the nerve to ask Giles the question she keeps turning over in her mind.

“Why didn’t you put me on suicide watch?” she asks. It’s their tenth mostly silent visit. She has a whole list of them in her journal: _Dear Diary, today Giles came to drink tea and say nothing._

Giles raises his eyebrows. “Are you saying you plan to kill yourself?”

“Well, it would be logical, right?” she says. “I mean, to think I would. You know, there was the whole dead girlfriend thing. And the flaying thing. And the trying to destroy the world. A person who pulled herself back from the brink of that might, you know, _think_ about dying.”

“They might,” Giles says evenly. “Nonetheless, you are quite clearly alive.”

Willow swallows the lump in her throat. “But if a person cared about someone who might think about dying...well, they would probably do some kind of suicide watch thing. _If_ they cared.” 

Giles sighs into his tea. “If I did not care about your survival, what possible reason would I have for bringing you here?”

Willow frowns. “Maybe you were afraid to kill me. Or maybe it was too much work. Maybe you thought if you left me alone long enough I’d do the job myself.”

Giles slips off his glasses and rubs his eyes. It’s such a _Giles_ thing to do, and something in Willow’s chest loosens. 

“You are here because I hold myself partly responsible for your descent,” Giles says. “I allowed you unfettered access to advanced magical texts and did very little to provide you with appropriate training. It terribly was poor judgment on my part. Nonetheless --” he fixes Willow with a hard stare -- “it is not my role to convince you of your worth, to cajole into a new life, or to supply a reason for your continued existence.”

He stands up and pushes his chair in. He leaves his napkin folded neatly on the table and rinses his teacup in the kitchen sink. Civility, Willow realizes, is Giles’ armor.

“If you intend to survive -- and for the record, I have never doubted that you do -- it is your job, and your job alone, to determine your value and your reason for existence.” He pauses with a hand on the doorknob, his face softening for a moment. “It is no easy task, but I’m afraid it is an indispensable part of growing up.”

***

It takes Willow a long time to notice she can’t use magic. At first, she hadn’t wanted to use any. When she thought about it, she remembered the electricity running through her skin, and it made her feel dirty. 

She scrubbed the toilet the old fashioned way, even though it was clean. She wiped at the chipped teacups until the ceramic sparkled in the sun. Once she’d even ironed her jeans, just for the hell of it. Those were the things she’d done with magic before, and they weren’t as difficult or terrible as she’d thought they might be.

And then one morning she summoned a pencil without even thinking about it. It didn’t come. Neither did the fork sitting a few inches to her left. She summoned the napkin, but it wouldn’t lift so much as a corner. Her heart raced. Tears pooled in the corner of her eyes. She wanted to call out for help, to tell someone what was happening to her, but of course she was alone. And if she weren’t alone, would it matter? Xander would smile kindly and say, “I don’t know, Will, maybe this is better. Non-magical Willow was pretty awesome too, you know. She so rarely flayed people.”

But losing her magic _wouldn’t_ be better. Magic is she who she _is_.

***

The next morning, Giles finds her in bed. She’d thrown the alarm clock on the ground. Its glass face had shattered, and her foot is bleeding where she’d stepped on a shard. She’d gone back to bed after that.

“You appear to be suffering a downturn,” Giles says, sipping his tea placidly as ever. 

Since coming back to England, he’d reverted to tweed and pocket squares, and Willow feels ridiculous sitting next to him in her bathrobe.

“I can’t do magic anymore,” she says. 

“Is that a bad thing?” Giles asks, eyebrows raised.

It was a hard question to answer. Maybe she had been a better person before she used magic -- or maybe not. _Someone_ had to save Angel’s soul. But if she’s being honest with herself -- and she thinks that’s something she should start doing -- she doesn’t want the magic to help the world. She wants it so that she won’t ever have to be that mousy sophomore, picked on and derided by her classmates, powerless to stop one of her best friends from being murdered.

She always thought she wanted magic to save the Jesses of the world and to play her part in Buffy’s fight, but that wasn’t true. She’d wanted power. Plain and simple.

Maybe there’d always been a monster inside her.

***

The next day, Willow makes a point of getting out of bed and wearing actual clothes, but Giles doesn’t come. Ten o’clock passes, then ten thirty, and eleven. At first, Willow’s worried, and then she’s angry. Is he just going to leave her here, stranded behind a gate that she can’t open? 

But wait -- how does she know she can’t open the gate? Had she just assumed that she was helpless inside a cabin, when really she could have walked out any day? 

The truth is, she’d wanted to be confined. It meant she didn’t have to worry about controlling herself. But that was the easy way out. Whatever she intended for her future, it wasn’t the life of a mountain hermit. She would have to interact with people sometime, which meant she would have to go outside, which meant…

Well, first things first. She's going to have to find her shoes.

Half an hour later, she retrieves them from under the bed, where they’d cuddled up to some dust bunnies. That probably qualifies for Obi Wan-level hermitting. Xander would have laughed at that if he were here.

Outside the sky is gray and the grass is brown. The air is cool and still. Her footsteps barely make a sound on the grass. She kicks a rock experimentally. It skitters down the path toward the gate, echoing in the silence. _Purgatory_ , Willow thinks. She shivers and hugs her jacket more tightly around her. Maybe she did die. Maybe Giles had killed her, and now she's here, awaiting judgment with some kind of Giles ghost thing to keep her company.

Her skin prickles as she approaches the gate, but not in a bad way. More like in a warm tingly way. Like the way she'd felt those first few nights practicing spells with Tara. She'd forgotten magic even _could_ feel this way, and the realization makes her feel ashamed.

She takes an experimental step backward, and the magic disappears, leaving behind the faintest prickling on her skin. One step forward, and she can feel the magic again. Relief surges through her. Her magic isn't gone; it's just...suspended by the force field around the cabin. But Giles couldn't have _told_ her that? _Hey, don't freak out, but I stuck you inside some kind of anti-magic containment field since you tried to destroy the world._ And then she could have said, _Totally reasonable precaution, Giles, thanks for letting me know._ Instead he'd forced her to lie in bed, thinking that the best thing about her life was gone.

Well, he can't keep her here forever. She walks right up to the edge of the fence, gathering all her power around her. With a deep breath, she flings it at the invisible barricade. There's a flash of purple light, and then she's flying backward through the air toward the cabin.

Okay, she thinks. Maybe violence was not the answer. She shakes her head, trying to clear the ringing in her ears. Being in the dead zone around the cabin feels even worse now that she'd touched magic again -- like she'd cut off an arm, or lost one of her senses. Maybe that was the answer to Giles' question. It would be bad to never do magic again because it's a part of who she is, and she can't surrender it any more than she could cut off a part of her body. 

Before, she'd thought that maybe magic was like drugs. She should stop using it the way, say, Robert Downey Jr. eventually realized that shooting heroin into his veins was a really, really bad idea. But magic isn't a drug; it's an ability. Giving it up wouldn't be like cutting off an arm. It would be like keeping your arm and telling yourself that you could never, ever use it. It would probably work for, oh, ten minutes. Maybe even a whole day if you were careful. But before you knew it, you'd start using it again, just because it was there. 

The only way she could avoid using magic was to stay in a place like this for the rest of her life, and look at her after just one morning without Giles. Clearly, she's not meant for a life of cloistered contemplation. And since she'd already eliminated suicide from her list of available options, she has exactly one choice: figure out how to control her magic so she doesn't have to worry about killing people anymore.

So basically, she only has to do the most difficult and terrifying thing she's ever imagined. What was it Giles said to Buffy that one time? That the hardest thing in the world is to live in it? And this whole thing with the cabin was his way of forcing her to see that she _did_ want to live in the world, no matter how hard it was. She's not sure whether she ought to hate him or fall on the ground and kiss his feet.

But first things first: she needs to get out of here. She approaches the gate again, more slowly this time. Then she calls on the barest trace of power and pushes gently at the latch. It swings open in front of her.


End file.
